Category: General

Maintenance – maximum cooling for old work horse

Oscar Carl Henrik

I have re-pasted my Thinkpad X220 processor a couple of times. The Arctic Silver nr 5 I found did a real good jobb keeping my CPU as cool as one could hope for. The X220 has a tendency of running a bit hot.. (no exaggeration…^^). 

Then Youtube lured me into videos that talked about liquid metal. Which of course I could not resist trying out. 

The result, even though maybe not miraculously different from the Arctic Silver 5, I still feel made the computer work those extra degrees cooler. Biggest difference I would say is that the CPU temp is practically never running at 95-96 degrees Celsius which was often the case under load before, but rather stays around 88-92 with only rare tops at 94. Also it seems to cool down faster once any high load drops. So overall I am very happy I took the time to do it. 

Tip: If you have a ThinkPad and for some reason never heard of the small app called TPFanControl, it’s a really nice way of fine tuning the fan speeds at different temperatures. Currently there is no development and the latest version that I know of is V 0.63.

Disclaimer: Please note that liquid metal is electrically conductive, so do not use it if you do not know what you are doing, since it can easily short circuit and destroy your computer. 

 

Space Sunday

Oscar Carl Henrik

This is really cool.

Also check out this account for some really nice pics.